Monuments and Primal Scenes: The Uses of Stillness and Violence in Horror

Stillness Incarnate: the blind seeress Emily and her dog, from Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

In his essay, "The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film," Sean Collins (of ADDTF) tries to address what he sees as "a gap in existing horror scholarship and theory." Specifically, he notes slasher-centric theories that focus on "violence and gore as the defining characteristics of the horror film," and monster-centric theories with their focus on the "frightening and revolting 'stars' of the movies and their relation to gender and social concerns," but then he goes on to identify a certain kind of image that looms very large (sometimes literally!) in horror films, which none of these theories can account for. This he calls the "monumental horror-image." What defines it most broadly are its static nature and a certain style of presentation designed to maximize its impact as a visual object (i.e. centering it on the screen, lighting it very clearly and even harshly, contextualizing the image as a POV shot from a horrified spectator, etc.). What makes this kind of image particularly intriguing--and confounding for so much horror film theory--is its effectiveness in inspiring horror, despite the fact that it poses seemingly no threat of physical violence or harm.

Sean breaks this down into two categories:

The first is the sudden—yet curiously static—appearance of a being in a place where no one ought to be, in defiance of what character and audience know to be "possible" [for example, the ghostly twin little girls in Kubrick's Shining]; the second is the sight of a monumental, monolithic, or literally statuesque object, serving as a testament to the presence of evil, madness, sickness, or irrationality [for example, the Wicker Man]. Taken together, these two distinct yet related image types—call them the monumental horror-image, in that their subjects are horrifying more for what they represent than what they actually do—comprise some of contemporary horror cinema’s most definitively frightening moments.

Sean goes on to explore, examine, and argue on behalf of the monumental horror-image in light of a number of theories of horror and film, and actually concludes that it is The Definitive image of horror! Which leaves quite a lot dangling. Sean mounts some plausible arguments against the view that gory violence should be definitive of horror, but surely it's not dispensable, and Sean offers no suggestion of where it might fit in the scheme of things if the monumental horror-image were taken as definitive. He would seem to have filled one gap at the expense of creating another.

It turns out, however, that there may just be a way for us to have it all--the monuments, the violence, and even the monsters.

Sean begins his exploration of the monumental horror-image by considering it in light of Freud's classic essay, "The Uncanny," which does indeed give him a lot of persuasive ammunition. Ironically, though, had he only flipped back a few pages in that very same volume (XVII) of the Standard Edition, he'd have found Freud's direct analysis of an image from the nightmare of a patient, which certainly looks to me like a paradigm example of the first category of monumental horror-image:

'"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped some danger, and went to sleep again.

'"The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me."[']

. . .

He [the patient] had always emphasized the fact that two factors in the dream had made the greatest impression on him: first, the perfect stillness and immobility of the wolves, and secondly, the strained attention with which they looked at him.

Naturally, Freud interrogates and aims to interpret every detail of this image, but it so happens that the two aspects that most concerned the patient are also the two aspects most relevant for this discussion.

First, there's that heightened sense of looking. According to Freud,

He thought that the part of the dream which said that 'suddenly the window opened of its own accord' was not completely explained by its connection with the window [in a story the patient recalled from childhood]. 'It must mean: "My eyes suddenly opened." I was asleep, therefore, and suddenly woke up, and as I woke I saw something: the tree with the wolves.' No objection could be made to this; but the point could be developed further. He had woken up and had seen something. The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point, therefore, a transposition had taken place.

This emphasis on looking strikes me as quite reminiscent of the cinematic techniques mentioned by Sean in connection with the monumental horror-image, calculated to elicit in the viewer an exaggerated sense that she is looking at something. The window element which frames the tree in the dream seems highly analogous to the isolation and centering of an object toward the rear of a shot.

Now, where things get really interesting is when we see how Freud interprets the surreal stillness of the wolves:

What, then, if the other factor emphasized by the dreamer were also distorted by means of a transposition or reversal? In that case instead of immobility (the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him, but did not move) the meaning would have to be: the most violent motion. That is to say, he suddenly woke up, and saw in front of him a scene of violent movement at which he looked with strained attention. In the one case the distortion would consist in an interchange of subject and object, of activity and passivity: being looked at instead of looking. In the other case it would consist in a transformation into the opposite; rest instead of motion.

What follows is nothing less than Freud's unleashing on the world of his notion of the primal scene. Here's a great definition:

The expression "primal scene" refers to the sight of sexual relations between the parents, as observed, constructed, and/or fantasized by the child and interpreted by the child as a scene of violence. The scene is not understood by the child, remaining enigmatic but at same time provoking sexual excitement. [my italics]

This concept lends itself so well to the psychosexual interpretation of voyeuristically-staged, outrageously violent and bloody slasher set-pieces that it's practically a cliche of horror criticism. What's fascinating, though, is the suggestion that the stillness of Sean's monumental horror-image and the violence of the horror-murder set-piece are simply two sides of the same coin, doubles of each other, extremes that may bizarrely stand for each other precisely through the unconscious logic of transposition and the binding associative power of their polar opposition.

The Other Side of Stillness: horrific violence erupts when Emily's dog attacks, savaging her throat under the influence of malevolent otherworldly forces

Dario Argento, in the opening set-piece to his debut film, Bird with the Crystal Plumage, actually fuses these apparent opposites into a single vision. Adam Knee, in his essay, "Gender, Genre, Argento," describes it as "a veritable primal scene . . . characterized by unclarity, blood, violence, and a fascinating sexual ambiguity." It also happens to be set in a brightly-lit gallery among statuary that is aggressively grotesque and primitive.

As the curious protagonist catches a first uncertain glimpse of the figures, they are simultaneously struggling violently and locked together in an embrace that arrests their motion to the point of making them appear almost as still as the surrounding sculptures. When the figures wrench suddenly apart, the woman is left bleeding, and the protagonist is as horrified as he is helpless to assist her, trapped as he is in the glass vestibule. Here we have the primal scene as monumental horror-image, and vice-versa. Perhaps it's not so far-fetched to hope they could be brought together in a unified theory of horror.

There's plenty more to be said, but I'm going to yield the floor here and give Sean a chance to respond.

P.S.--As an aside, I would like to suggest also where monsters might fit in such a scheme. Wonderfully, monsters can serve both as monumental horror-images (i.e. that iconic still-shot of Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster) and as parties to a primal scene (i.e. the climactic werewolf vs. vampire woman battle in Naschy's Night of the Werewolf).